Matthew Karp is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its connections with the broader nineteenth-century world. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and joined the Princeton faculty in 2013. His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard, 2016) explores the relationship between American slavery and American power in the decades before the Civil War. 

Current Project

Karp has begun work on a book about the startling rise and radical political vision of the Republican Party in the 1850s.

Teaching Interests

At Princeton, Karp teaches courses on the Civil War era, the nineteenth-century United States, and political conflicts across the mid-nineteenth-century world.

Selected Articles

"In the 1850s, the future of American slavery seemed bright," Aeon, November 2016

"The New World Order," Boston Review, October 2016

"John Brown's Body,"  Public Books, May 2014

"Arsenal of Empire: Southern Slaveholders and the U.S. Military in the 1850s," Common-place, July 2012

"Slavery and American Sea Power: The Navalist Impulse in the Antebellum South," Journal of Southern History, May 2011